Marketing & Successful Marketing Practices

What is Marketing?

What is marketing? If you were to have asked me that question before I started this class, I would have likely answered that marketing is “advertising and selling products”. I now realize that advertising and selling makes up only a portion of marketing and that there are other components as well. Listed below are other components in marketing:

• Identifying and understanding customer’s wants and needs

• Understanding the marketplace

• Customer-driven marketing strategy

• Creating marketing programs

• Building customer relationships

If I were a business owner wanting to market my products and services, I would first need to identify and understand my customer’s wants and needs. I would also need to understand the marketplace where my customers reside. This can be done through market research. I would then focus on developing a customer-driven marketing strategy. This is a process where we identify our target market. Once the target market is identified we will then work to create a plan to offer products and services unlike our competitors. By doing this we create a differentiation from the competitors and will have more appeal to our customers. We then can create a marketing program which basically puts our marketing strategy to work. Once we have this foundation, we can work to build “lasting customer relationships by creating superior customer value and satisfaction” (Armstrong & Kotler, 2006). By doing this our customers will remain loyal to the business and will prove to be profitable.

Successful Marketing

An example of successful marketing is how the Subway Restaurant has expanded their franchises into convenience stores. “The number of Subway franchises in convenience stores has grown from fifty to more than two thousand” (Whitfield, 2006). Subway did not fall into the trap of a marketing myopia where they “focused on the product they offered rather than the benefits and experience produced by their products” (Armstrong & Kotler, 2006).